College pranks. They’re as old as the ivory towers themselves. Records tell of 18th century dormitory masters who often scolded their charges for “horsing around,” admonishing them to little avail. Students through the ages were rebuked for herding cows into campus chapels, rolling cannonballs through dormitory halls and locking professors in classrooms. And pranksters at Notre Dame once poured vodka in an orange juice dispenser in one of the dining halls—it was the high point of the day, recalled some Fighting Irish alums.

Covering toilet bowls with plastic wrap, resetting alarm clocks to go off in the middle of the night, stacking aluminum cans to barricade doorways and strategically placing rubber rodents on pillow cases are just some of the more traditional campus capers. More recently, Massachusetts Institute of Technology students hacked their way into the main MIT Web page and changed its Ivy League appearance into a Mickey Mouse ad. A campus building featuring Mickey’s ears appeared on the home page with the MIT logo tagged “a division of the Walt Disney Company.”

Aggie alums, it would appear, were not above such creative endeavors. Goats materialized in Young Hall and the Library, a wagon alighted atop Foster Hall, and cars lifted themselves up on stilts so they couldn’t be driven off.

Barbara Funkhouser ’52 recalls the time that students of Texas Western College in El Paso (now UTEP) slipped into an Aggie farm to open the gates separating the bulls and the cows, “ruining 50 years of research,” she snickered. In retaliation, a group of Aggies—this is hearsay, insists Funkhouser—hightailed it to the Texas campus to slather orange paint all over the Chi Omega house.

And one Halloween back in the late 30s, J. Henry Gustafson ’42 and his cronies lifted outhouses from nearby farms and ranches and placed them on the front steps of the original Hadley Hall.

Some of the high jinks, however, had a romantic edge. After dropping off their dates at the entrance to McFie Hall, a girls’ dormitory then located on the corner of College and El Paseo, Gustafson and another group of friends dashed to the west side of the building to be reunited with their sweethearts. “The girls would slip out the window,” said Gustafson. Keeping this behavior from McFie Hall matron Euphro Wizda “was a challenge,” he added. The runaway girls were always in fear of being found out. It was obviously worth it—one of those girls was Carolyn Kaiser, Gustafson’s wife of 60 years.

Ray Lankford ’38 also remembers the late-night visits to the girls’ dorms and the many pranks that would ensue. “I don’t know who put the board at the upper window for the girls to slide down to where us boys were, and I don’t know who put the tack in the board where it would catch the girls when they slid down, but boy there was some hollering when the tack would hit.

“I don’t know who would have done that.”

Tim Timmons ’61 knows exactly who stashed “five or six” empty beer kegs in a locker room to hide the evidence after a particularly memorable on-campus party.

And then there was the time that Jesse Gerard ’47 and a couple of classmates, on an evening lark, drove to the Texas Western campus, where the threesome promptly purloined Western’s famed cannon. With the wheeled cannon roped behind the car, the interlopers drove off. “Near Canutillo,” said Gerard, “the cannon wheels came off at a railroad crossing, so we stopped and put the cannon inside the car and threw the wheels on top.” Arriving at NMSU (then New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts), they “backed the car up next to the cesspool [near the TKE house] and just pushed it in and left the scene,” he recounted.

The next day, on the way to his 5 a.m. job at Animal Husbandry, Gerard noticed a crowd gathered by the cesspool. He didn’t stop. “The rescued cannon was taken to the engineering building,” Gerard said, “so the wheels could be reattached.” But, according to Gerard, the Aggies weren’t quite finished, as “some engineering students poured crimson red paint down the cannon’s barrel.”

When the Western Miners learned the fate of their cannon, “they stole the clapper from [NMSU’s] Victory Bell, then located on Lover’s Lane, a path that led from McFie dormitory to Hadley Hall,” explained Gerard.

“We made ourselves scarce during all of this,” Gerard added, referring to his cohorts in crime.

The stolen items were later exchanged during half time at an Aggies vs. Miners Sun Bowl football game. Anticipating trouble, campus police surrounded the cannon to make sure it wasn’t stolen again. But the exchange was peaceful, and justice was ultimately served with an Aggie win that day.

Gerard paused. “Hmm. I wonder if this should be published? When does the statute of limitations run out on something like this?” None of us are sure. But we can be sure that tomorrow’s alums are busy right now creating their own tales to tell.

Sunny Conley ’94